YMMV / Grim Fandango

• Ass Pull: While it's relatively minor and has little impact on the actual plot, the revelation that Hell exists comes almost completely out of nowhere, since up until that point, we were led to believe that the worst punishment an immoral person can serve in this universe is working away your debt (presumably, the worse you were, the more work you have to do) and then walking four years to get to heaven. Then again, it's never directly identified as Hell in the "opposite of heaven" sense, and could just be a special part of the Eighth Underworld that's miserable and bars you from heaven for whatever length of time if The Powers That Be decide you're beyond redemption.
• Awesome Music: The game has a top-notch soundtrack, especially in the remastered version. Every song is so smooth and atmospheric that picking out favourites is almost impossible, so go ahead and knock yourself out with the original or the remastered version.
• Broken Base: The remastered version. In one camp, you have the fans who dislike it due to any number of reasons (mainly the changes, or lack thereof), argue that it did the game a disservice and, in some cases, won't even give the game a positive review on Steam or PlayStation Network despite actually liking the game. In the other camp, you have the fans who are just happy the game got re-released at all, finally freeing it from Keep Circulating the Tapes and making it much more accessible to a new generation of gamers.
• Complete Monster: Hector LeMans is behind the corruption in the Department of Death. Having infiltrated the DoD, Hector steals the Number Nine tickets, the fastest way to get to the Land of Eternal Rest, from the souls of the righteous and counterfeits them, knowing that whoever uses them is plunged into Hell. The righteous souls are then left to wander the Land of the Dead until they're eventually kidnapped while traversing the ocean and sent to a factory owned by Hector at the Edge of the World to be eternally enslaved. Hector then uses sprouting, a way to kill the already-departed, by firing special plant bullets into the skeletal body, spreading until the victim is nothing more than an empty husk filled with flowers. Hector murders hundreds with this method, and keeps their bodies as a field of flowers in his hideout; he also preserves the corpses of his victims as trophies. In the climax, Hector has Salvador's body sprouted and his head removed for questioning, and he shoots protagonist Manuel "Manny" Calavera with a slow-acting Sproutella.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Oh, many. The game has a huge cast of characters and none of them are stock characters. One of the more memorable ones is Chowchilla Charlie, who is part Peter Lorre.
  Manny: I think slot machines attract an undesirable element.
  Charlie: Oh, we're all undesirable, Manny...
  Manny: Yeah, but your credit's no good to boot.
  • Bruno Martinez, a short angry man who gets mailed to the Ninth Underworld, has exactly three scenes and steals the show each time.
    Bruno: (seeing the Grim Reaper for the first time) Nice bathrobe.
• Genius Bonus: The title itself. Sending somebody "to dance the grim fandango" is to send them to be hanged until dead (with the 'dance' being the jerking movements the body makes as its owner expires).
  • The disturbing connotations that flowers have in the land of the dead are extremely fitting for a world inspired by Mexican traditions. To the Aztecs, flowers were a metaphor for blood, as in the vital fluid of the living. Flowers were also often used symbolically to represent the lives of people and symbolic sacrifices of these flowers occurred.
• Harsher in Hindsight: The very first image you see when you boot up the game is a Logo Gag where the Golden Man in the LucasArts logo turns into a skeleton. Now that the company has gone belly-up, it's almost laughable how fitting it is, but still painful to any long-time fans.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: With LucasArts now being owned by Disney, the release of Pixar's Coco, a movie about the Day of the Dead, may create some comparisons. Said movie also has a skeleton named Hector (spelled Héctor in Coco), but he's the deuteragonist and a good guy, while this game's Hector is the Big Bad.
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: While the news of an HD re-release in 2015 was warmly received, some fans were disappointed that the game wasn't completely re-made from scratch, and instead just upscaled all the pre-rendered elements from the original 1998 release. That said, the new version still updates most of the player models, adds a lighting system, replaces the original Resident Evil-style controls with a point-and-click interface, and includes a fully orchestrated soundtrack.
  • Also, it was pointed out that many files from the original games were lost and making them from scratch was hard, especially the pre-rendered backgrounds they probably lost the original 3D models and couldn't pre-render them again, and changing the game from a 4:3 aspect ratio to 16:9 would need several changes since the game used fixed cameras, and it was argued that Grim Fandango was a commercial failure in its original release and they couldn't spend much on the re-release since it could suffer the same fate.
• Moral Event Horizon: Nick sprouting Lola. Domino trying to murder Glottis. Olivia torturing Sal. Hector... OK, Hector was just always evil.
• Narm: Manny looks cool in his reaper robe and all, but the entirety of the climax (where he wears the outfit the entire time) becomes a little silly because you know under that robe he's wearing his stilts to go confront Hector.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The inventory system, which has you scroll through your items one at a time with an animation between each that takes a couple of seconds.
  • The control scheme on the whole has been widely criticized, especially as time has gone on. Although it still uses the same basic mechanics as any other past LucasArts adventure game, the point-and-click control scheme was completely discarded in favour of character control. So rather than using a context-sensitive cursor, you have to manually move the player character around the world and look for things to examine. Many a player will also spend a good chunk of time trying to remember what keys (or, if you're using a controller, buttons) do what action, something that was quite intuitively done in past games with the simple use of verbs or icons. The control scheme is pretty clearly an artifact of the experimental era of 3D games, and its problems became even more glaring when their next (and last) adventure game lacked the powerful story to help make it forgivable. Some even go so far as to say the inclusion of point-and-click controls in the remaster is enough to make it far superior to the original, as it removes the one major qualm most had.
• Signature Scene:
  • The opening cutscene. "Sorry for the wait, Mr. Flores. I'm ready to take you now."
  • The Year Two sequence. Manny dressed in the white Casablanca-esque tuxedo tends to be the most recognizable image from the game.
• Special Effect Failure: Some characters are pre-rendered for complex animations, like Glottis or Don Copal stepping out of a door. It's near seamless when they're rendered in the same style as the in-engine models, but since they're unaffected by the remaster's new lighting, turning it on makes them stick out like a sore thumb.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
  • The replacement of the SCUMM point and click control and inventory system for the new (and shortlived) LUA-based GrimE did not sit well with adventure fans. The tank like movement was awkard and, considering the camera for each scene was fixed, walking onto a new set would mean you’d need to orientate yourself all afresh. Tim Schafer recognized the shortcomings and years later would contact Tobias Pfaff - who created a fan-made point-and-click modification - to obtain access to his code and finally incorporate it into the remastered version.
  • Some faithful Grim Fandango fans were annoyed by the removal of some sound cues (especially with Bruno's scenes), the unnecessary 360 panning around Olivia, as she reads the "Grim Fandango" poem (which showed that she was never meant to be seen from some angles), and the end credits music, was changed.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • The Department of Death itself, implied to be a huge government organisation of some sort that Manny's office is part of, has a surprisingly small role in the main story. Given that many lives of the innocent are at stake, you might expect the game to at least hint at how the villains are hiding their scheme under its nose, but that rarely becomes a plot point. The ending has Manny getting issued a Number Nine ticket by the company for all the good deeds he did, but even that one happens offscreen.
  • In Year 3, we get to see trapped souls at the edge of the Underworld who are practically held as prisoners, and the experience Manny shares with them is what ultimately turns him into Big Damn Hero, determined to save not just Meche, but everyone who got their tickets stolen. Despite its importance, the major plot in Year 3 is more concerned about escaping from the island, and the final act quickly pushes the characters to the background. It's not bad, but it's a letdown when comparing it to how Year 2 introduced memorable side characters excellently weaved together with Manny's quest.
• Ugly Cute: Glottis may be a big, clunky, razor-toothed demon, but man if his personality doesn't more than make up for it.
• Viewer Gender Confusion: Bibi, one of the two angelitos working for Domino in Year 3, is a girl. Good luck figuring this out on your own, though; her name doesn't lend itself either way, she has no hair or Tertiary Sexual Characteristics to speak of, her voice could easily pass as that of a prepubescent boy, and neither her personality nor clothes are much different from her brother Pugsy's, and no dialogue refers to her as "she". Spanish speakers, on the other hand, would know that Bibi is short for "Bibiana", a popular girl's name.

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